In the following, I understand the Internet as a massive text connected by many participants conversing with one another. Parts of the text are in close connection, and the discussion can be viewed as heated insofar as the sub-texts reference each other in some way (links are merely one example of such cross-references). Other parts of the text are fairly isolated, hardly discussed, rarely (if ever) referenced. I want to argue that the former parts are “well formed” in the sense that they follow Grice (1975)’s cooperative principle, and that the latter seem to evidence a sort of prejudice (performed by the disengaged participants) — which I hope to be able to elucidate more clearly.

Before I embark on this little adventure, let me ask you to consider two somewhat complementary attitudes people commonly choose between when they are confronted with conversational situations. These are usually referred to as “feelings” — and in order to simplify, I will portray them as if they were simply logically diametrically opposed … whereas I guess most situations involve a wide variety of factors each varying in shades of gray rather than simple binary black versus white, one versus zero. Let’s just call them trust and distrust, and perhaps we can ascribe to elements of any situation as trustworthy versus distrustworthy.

Together, these two factors of prejudice (in other words: preliminary evaluations of other-trustworthiness and self-confidence) crucially impact our judgment of whether or not to engage in conversations, discussions, to voice our own opinions, whether online or offline.

As we probably all know, the world is not as simple as a reduction to two factors governing the course of all conversations. For example: How does it happen that a person comes to fall on this end or that end of either scale? No doubt a person’s identity is influenced by a wide variety of group affiliations and/or social mores, norms and similar contextual cues which push and pull them into some sort of category, whether left or right, wrong or fixed, up or down, in or out with mainstream groupings. One of the most detailed investigations of the vast complexity and multiplicity woven into the social fabric is the seminal work by Berger and Luckmann titled “The Social Construction of Reality”.

While I would probably be the first to admit the above approach is a huge oversimplification of something as complex as all of human interactions on a global scale, I do feel the time is ripe for us to admit that the way we have approached the issue thus far has been so plagued with falsehoods and downright failures, that we cannot afford ourselves to continue down this path. In an extreme “doomsday” scenario, we might face nuclear war, runaway global warming, etc. all hidden behind “fake news” propaganda spread by robots gone amok. In other words, continuing this way could be tantamount to mass suicide, annihilation of the human race, and perhaps even all life on the planet. Following Pascal, rather than asking ourselves whether there is a meaning to life, I also venture to ask whether we can afford to deny life has any meaning whatsoever — lest we be wrong.

If I am so sure that failing to act could very well lead to total annihilation, then what do I propose is required to save ourselves from our own demise?

First and foremost, I propose we give up the fantasy of a simplistic true-or-false type binary logic that usually leads to the development of “Weapons of Math Destruction”. That, in my humble opinion, would be a good first step.

What ought to follow next might be a realization that there are infinite directions any discussion might lead (rather than a simplistic “pro” vs. “contra”). I could echo Wittgenstein’s insight that the limits of directions are the limits of our language — and in this age of devotion to ones and zeros, we can perhaps find some solace in the notion of a vocabulary of more than just two cases.

Once we have tested the waters and begun to move forewards toward the vast horizons available to us, we may begin to understand the vast multi-dimensionality of reality — for example including happy events, sad events, dull events, exciting events and many many more possibilities. Some phenomena may be closely linked, other factors may be mutually orthogonal in a wide variety of different ways. Most will probably be neither diametrically opposed nor completely aligned — the interconnections will usually be interwoven in varying degrees, and the resulting complexity will be difficult to grasp simply. Slowly but surely we will again become familiar with the notion of “subject expertise”, which in our current era of brute force machinistic algorithms has become so direly neglected.

If all goes well, we might be able to start wondering again, to experience amazement, to become dazzled with the precious secrets of life and living, to cherish the mysterious and puzzling evidences of fleeting existence, and so on.

Over the past couple months, I have worked on developing a mission statement for one of my overarching goals – something like a „life goal“. Initial attempts were quite abstract, and I was greatly helped by the very considerate feedback of friends.

In the intervening weeks since those first trials, I have kept the general aim present but I have focused on it much less. Over the past several days, I have received several ideas from other sources – more or less haphazardly, which have motivated me to reconsider this particular life goal again from a new perspective.

For people who have been following my writing for several years, it should be no surprize that literacy is really at the crux of my thinking about many topics, and also with respect to this particular life goal for which I want to craft a mission statement. One thing that has been „bugging“ me for the past year or two is how my focus on literacy is considered by many – indeed, including myself – to be a non-human matter. In this view, reading, writing and arithmetic are technologies and therefore lack the warmth of flesh-and-blood human beings. Code and language are inert, not living things, and they cannot ultimately provide meaning in the same way as interaction with other humans can – as humans (so this argument) we are, after all, social animals.

This view, however, interprets technology from a very parochial point of view. According to this perspective, technology is merely an artefact, a curiosity, a product… albeit of human ingenuity. We pound nails not because there is anything interesting about doing so, but merely because doing so makes our lives easier from the results of applying such technologies. There is nothing interesting about iron or steel per se, but rather such materials are only interesting insofar as they can be manipulated into helping to make nails, just as nails are only interesting insofar as they can be used to build more things. As an aside: It might make sense to think about how the technologies we use also create threating things – such as global warming, nuclear waste, AIDS and/or many other problems.

Yet let me not drift away from the current issue – crafting my mission statement. I view language and literacy somewhat differently than most… and over the years, my thinking about these things has also undergone continued development and refinement. While I have long known (or believed) that language cannot be owned (e.g. by a monarch) or dictated (e.g. to the masses), I am now at a point where I feel it may be useful to extrapolate beyond this rather mundane and obvious fact to recognize a „rationality of literacy“, in which people make a rational decision to engage with each other via linguistic technologies. In this vein, literacy is also not simply owned or attained, but rather it is practiced (or – in the case of illiteracy – not practiced).

This is important because it redirects our attention away from the ownership of resources to the actual use of such resources. To give a concrete example: In order to engage with „cars“, it is not necessary to own cars. Engagement with cars can also happen when someone references cars. Statements like „cars are good“ or „cars are bad“ are social expressions insofar as there is agreement within a society regarding what these words (and expressions) mean.

Likewise, our level of engagement with a topic can be as small or as large as our involvement with various other social institutions related to that topic. We might simply talk about cars with very little engagement, or we might become much more involved with cars by joining organizations that deal with them and associated technologies. Our involvement with „cars“ may lead us to become involved with „pedestrians“, „streets“, „roads“, „highways“, „infrastructure“, „pollution“, „global warming“ and many other topics, too.

We do not need to become dictators in any of these arenas. It is completely sufficient to simply engage – to participate in the social construction of the reality related to each of these terms. It ought to be quite plain to see that the reality we thereby create in one arena might not be the exact same reality created in another arena. There might be nuanced differences, but there might also be meaningful relationships between and among the various arenas.

Increased engagement in more and more arenas goes hand in hand with increased literacy. These two phenomena are crucially related: You cannot have one without the other (that is, at least, a hypothesis I am venturing here).

This thinking is what leads me to venture that the mission statement I need probably goes something like: My mission is to promote literacy – in order to increase community engagement and social cohesion, and also in order to motivate humans more towards alignment and harmony with natural evolution.

When you let the word “irrational” roll off your tongue, you do a very irrational thing: You specify something that doesn’t exist. It is very much like trying do describe a vaccum (not the cleaner, but rather the contents of emptiness).

These days, it is very popular and a big hit to argue that people are economically motivated by irrational behaviors. That is also sort of like saying “light is dark”.

Arguing with such nonsense is an exercise in futility. Just because someone can’t explain something does not mean there is no explanation for it. Besides that, I challenge anyone to give an adequately precise definition of the term “irrational”. In my opinion, the fact that a brain is in a living state means that there is some kind of rationalization going on. It may seem odd, but mainly if you are unfamiliar with odd things, odd thought, odd behavior and such.

Let me give you an example. There’s a guy named Dan Ariely who maintains to be an expert on irrationality. I’ve watched some of his presentations, and I’ve observed that he actually seems to be jiving people: He says he talks about irrational behavior, but actually what he is talking about behavior that simply doesn’t conform to the laws of economics commonly taught in academia. For example, in one talk a paid attention to, he mentioned some law which basically said that if someone prefers A to B and also prefers B to c, it would be irrational to prefer C to A. What nonsense! This would be like saying that if someone likes ketchup more than relish, they would do something like drink a whole bottle of ketchup right out of the bottle. My hunch is that before someone had drunk less than half the bottle, they would no longer go near the ketchup for at least a week. Would that be irrational?

I have a friend who works in the field of healthcare, and we were talking about corruption in the medical and pharmaceutical industries – the kind that leads to patients getting misdiagnosed and mistreated. I had shared something I had written with him, and as he is also a renowned author, I asked for his opinion on the piece… which was in particular also quite critical of healthcare providers in his particular niche (though it was not critical of him personally).

He remarked that it was very well written and convincing. I wondered and asked whether he also felt that my criticism of his professional colleagues was warranted. He noted that his profession could hardly be criticised, and agreed that this bad situation is rather the result of a corrupt system. Then he asked me what I intend to do about it.

I was somewhat taken aback, because I feel I am already doing quite a lot. I quite oftenly speak publicly on this and related topics, I probably write even more on them, and then I am also working to correct what I consider to be one of the primary root causes of these very significant, very fundamental problems in the healthcare industry.

In order to explain what I mean, I need to backtrack… more than a decade. Another one of my friends has done a lot of medical research, has quite advanced academic degrees and is also the director of a hospital. (I have many friends who work in healthcare, in part because I spent a large portion of my adult life living very close to a quite well-known medical school) Once in a discussion with many of his colleagues – plus me – I heard him say that the vast majority (perhaps something like 80%) of medical conditions are a matter of psychology, or at least that they are so strongly influenced by the patient’s psychological state, that it is essentially a matter of psychology. This statement strongly influenced my thinking then, and since then I have also not heard of anything that might contradict the hypothesis. Nonetheless, I don’t know to what degree it is an accepted medical theory.

On the contrary, my close affiliations with the healthcare industry – whether as a patient or as a support group leader or even simply many close connections to people affected by a wide variety of conditions – strengthen my belief in this very insightful observation. Another „academic“ friend of mine has quite often mentioned Rudolf Virchow in this vein, maintaining that it was Virchow who first recognized that many illnesses are … something like: socially constructed.

This is no wonder to me. For years now, I have increasingly become aware that perhaps one of the greatest plagues humanity suffers is the way some humans behave with respect to their fellow humans – to put it succintly, many (if not even most) behave abominably. One example of how such abominable behavior plays out „in real life“ is what is often referred to as „bullying“ (or a similar phenomenon known in Europe as „mobbing“). My gut feeling is that whereas bullying refers to demeaning a person in general, mobbing is more about a concerted „social“ effort to „be negative“ towards a person. What I find particularly odd is how the healthcare industry appears to have no problem whatsoever with portraying the victims of such behavior as the people who are ill, sick, who apparently need to swallow pills or whatever. The same holds for many other illnesses considered to be psychological in nature, such as depression, post traumatic stress disorder, etc.

Now let me get back to my discussion I had the other day – and my answer to the question: „what am I going to do about it?“ After being taken aback, something clicked in my head and I replied: The problem is, really, that we measure the value of people using only one statistic: money (see also „the vast majority of people have been drilled with truisms such as the notion that money is a reliable metric of value“). Today, if you have a lot of money, then you are usually considered successful. Likewise, if you have little or no money, you are usually considered a failure. What is more: The validity of many statements (e.g., what is written on the front page of the New York Times) is often considered to be supported by the money „leading“ companies contribute (i.e. as advertisements) in order to show up in support of such headlines (cf. also the definition of „retard media“). The meaninglessness of brand names is very closely related to the anonymity of money as a unit of value, as a technology for transferring value without the friction of any sentiments whatsoever. Ideally, you can easily use „cold hard cash“ to pay for a product or service without leaving even the slighest trace of your name, your identity, or your affilation with anyone or anything on Earth. Your cash bills may contribute to slavery, exploitation, global warming or any other issue on a long laundry list of social diseases… without leaving any fingerprint, footprint, or whatever. Money enables you to be so careless that you are basically free to have no cares at all.

This care-free power of money is probably why many people consider it to be the ultimate measure of success. I, on the other hand, see in money nothing but anonymous power – like that of a king with no face. Money is actually no more capable of transmitting what you care about than a robot is capable of feeling what you feel.

If you want to feel – no, if you want to be attached to something you care about, in other words if you want to engage in a relationship with that thing or person, then you shouldn’t use money to do that. Money leaves no trace. You want to create a bond. You need to sign, your signature needs to be part and parcel of your care, your values, your engagement, your actions and you yourself. You must use an „alternative currency“.

The currency you use must be meaningful, the antithesis of a meaninglessbrand name. Meaning is also socially constructed. You can heal just as well as you can hurt. What are you going to do?